Those Damn Aces
by funguss
Summary: Ginny sits in a rocking chair which turns out to be a time-machine. She time-travels to an area near Ypres in 1917. BIG uh-oh. Many things ensue. Luna Lovegood comes-a-lookin' for her eventually.
1. Insomnia

Ginny could not sleep. She hardly ever slept; there was always too much to worry about so she had no time for sleep. Sleeping was for pussies. She tossed and turned in bed for a while, rather sad that her fourth year had just ended, but glad that she was home with her loving family. She had just turned fifteen that day but was disappointed that she felt no different.  
  
"I'm... thirsty" she said to herself even though she was not all that thirsty. She lay in bed for about six more minutes before lazily rolling out and plodding downstairs. Pouring herself a glass of water, she noticed a rocking chair in the family room that had not been there before, it seemed to still be rocking as if somebody were in it.  
  
"Alright, Chester, you can stop folling around with the rocking chair," Ginny said groggily. Chester was the resident ghost at the Burrow. Nothing happened so she cautiously walked to the chair and grabbed the back of it to stop it from rocking. "Chester?"  
  
Ginny collapsed into the chair and suddenly, everything around her peeled away. A ripping pain was sent through her back. She jammed her eyes shut and shouted but the pain was gone.  
  
Ginny opened her eyes and looked around, wondering where the hell she was. Tall grass whipped about in the wind and it was rather chilly but not unbearably so. Rising from the rockingchair, she slowly walked across the hill. The landscape looked dull and exhausted. "Could this be another dimension or something?" Ginny wondered out loud.   
  
A faint whistling sound grew louder until the source of this noise--a shell--landed ontop of the rockingchair, blowing it to smithereens.  
  
"Shit." 


	2. A Ghastly Surprise

"Now how the hell am I supposed to get back?" Ginny asked herself. "Where the hell am I?"  
  
She knew that she had become stuck in the Great War and that she should scoot right away. But how? Wondering where the nearest sign of proper civilization was, she cautiously made her way towards a footpath at the edge of the hill but shrieked when she stumbled on a dead soldier. There were hundreds of them littering the sides of the dusty road.  
  
"You'd better run as fast as you can," she heard a British accent say. "I'd hate to think what the krauts'll do to you if you're dressed in a sheer blue nightslip."  
  
Ginny spun around because she hadn't expected anybody to be nearby. The place had just seemed so bare.  
  
"Where's the closest town?" she demanded, panicked and shocked by the horrible sight along the road.  
  
The British soldier chuckled in response. "Most of them have been raided by those damn krauts. Go home, sweetcheeks."  
  
Ginny was confused as to why somebody would leave a portal lying around in the house without warning her.  
  
"!" she shouted at the top of her lungs. It echoed through the hills.  
  
"What a fresh mouth for a lady. Say, are you taller than I am?" The soldier asked in what seemed like a sad attempt to flirt with her.  
  
"I'm afraid I am," Ginny muttered while stooping down to take a closer look at a headless corpse. She had Ron's height genes--five feet and nine and a half inches---and Fred's and George's cleverness.  
  
"What on earth are you doing?" asked the soldier, rushing to her.  
  
"Trying to make do so I don't get raped and killed and raped again while I find my way home. This one is a bit TOO tall." She moved to a corpse that looked relatively untouched. 'Must have been gassed, ' she thought.  
  
"Turn around," Ginny demanded of the annoying soldier.  
  
"Wh-what?" he asked.  
  
"Turn around please. I'd like to change," she insisted while unbottoning the dead soldier's jacket.  
  
Ginny dropped her nightslip in the middle of the footpath and then carefully strapped the helmet to her head but discovered that she had too much hair to be able to bunch it up atop her head so she would have to say goodbye to it.  
  
"Damn, this one's been looted," she pointed out but shaking the gassed soldier's pack upside down. Nothing fell out. "Cut please?" She let her wavy red hair cascade down her back.  
  
"Cut what?"  
  
"My hair."  
  
"How short?"  
  
"Gee, I don't know. I'm trying to look like a damn soldier."  
  
"Oh?... Oh! Okay."  
  
When the British soldier was done being a hairdresser, he left Ginny looking like a female Ron after waking up with a red bird's nest on her head.  
  
"Good enough," he said, watching Ginny place the helmet on her head. "But if you're meandering about all alone dressed as a Belgian soldier, the krauts'll kill you."  
  
"Only if they spot me. See, it's hard to hide a whole regiment. But it's easy to hide one soldier. Make sense?"  
  
"You'll probably be needing this," he said, handing Ginny a revolver.  
  
"Oh, I was about to take one off-"  
  
"I checked most of bodies. Their equiptment's already been swiped."  
  
"Thank you," Ginny said, taking the revolver from the kind British soldier.She had her wand tucked in her new pair of ill-fitting pants but the revolver was good to have too.  
  
"Good luck!" he yelled to her, waving. He watched as Ginny vanished over the hill. 


	3. Finding Food

A N: PLEASE R and R!  
  
Ginny sat down on a log, unable to believe the situation she found herself in. She tried to assure herself that it was just a bad dream and she would soon wake up in her own bed. How she longed for her large, cozy bed. The sun was about an hour away from setting and she would probably have to sleep in the dirt and leaves.  
  
But first things first. Ginny was hungry. For a second, she thought about hunting but quickly dismissed that idea. She would have to get food, but how? She could try to walk to a town and obtain food but she didn't even know where she was anymore. She could get food from a soldier, but first she would have to find one.  
  
Then Ginny remembered that she still had her wand. She could summon food. However, if any muggles were to see a can of spam floating around Belgium, her wand might be destroyed and magical powers be taken away. But there were exceptrions for emergencies and this counted as an emergency.  
  
"Accio food," Ginny said with a flick of her wand. After about three minutes, a box of watercrackers flew in her direction and landed in her lap. Watercrackers were not very nutritious but they would have to do.  
  
Meanwhile, a British soldier in a trench two miles away was wondering why the hell he saw a box of watercrackers drifting by. 


	4. The Ghost of Salazar

A/N: This is a sort of rewind to something that happened a little bit before. This part's quite bloody so brace yourself.  
  
February 11, 1914  
  
A young man, not much older than Ginny, was curled up in a growing pool of blood on the floor of a dimly lit study. He was wimpering and clawing at the dark green carpet. Two men stood off to the left side, leaning against a cobweb-encrusted bookshelft. A ghost stood not six inches away from the boy's trembling body.   
  
"What say you?" The ghost's voice boomed. The room seemed to shake. The weakened boy huddled on the floor flinched.  
  
"Answer him, son," demanded one of the men by the bookshelf.  
  
"I-I won't do it," the boy said meeky, blood dribbling from his frothing mouth as he sopke. His short breaths rattled painfully within his lungs.  
  
"Wrong answer!" The ghost roared, kicking the boy in the side, causing him to flop onto his side with an ear-splitting yelp.  
  
"You can't make me!" The boy shouted, tears pouring down his cheeks and mixing with the blood around his jaw.  
  
"Oh yes I will," the ghost chuckled, kicking the boy again, this time in the back of the head.  
  
He managed to hoist himself up with every last ounce of energy he had left and spat out a wad of blood.   
  
"You can't!" he screamed as he pulled his wand out of his robe pocket and pointed it at the ghost, who, with a mighty swipe, knocked the wand out of the boy's hand. It rolled to a stop about a yard away from its owner. He struggled forward tried to retrieve it--his fingers were only an inch away from grasping it but the ghost crushed both the boy's hand and the wand under his shoe with a slow cracking noise, and it wasn't just the wand. The boy shouted in agony, tears spraying from his eyes and blood oozing from under the ghost's shoe.  
  
"Salazar, he's my son, you shouldn't-" the same man from before began to plead, rushing forward.  
  
"SILENCE!" The ghost bellowed. The man skulked back into the shadow.  
  
"I'd die before I enter into this pact with you," the boy barely managed to say as he tried so hard to keep himself from collapsing.  
  
"Really? Well then..." the ghost sneered, slowly drawing his own wand. "I could execute the killing curse... but that would not be as much fun as watching you die slowly and painfully. Crucio!"  
  
The boy shouted desperately and wriggled uncontrollably on the floor, clinging to the threads of the carpet and tearing it to shreds.  
  
"Is that enough for you?" the ghost asked with a cackle.  
  
"No," the boy said through clenched teeth, his dark brown hair now drenched with blood from the kick to the back of his head earlier.  
  
"Good... Crucio!"  
  
The boy shrieked, tears gushing from his eyes and blood from his mouth. He wanted to yell stop, but he couldn't. He would rather die than give in. The pain became so excruciating that he dug his fingermails into his own shoulder, scraping off the flesh. It was the only way he could-  
  
Suddenly, the door flew open and an even younger boy entered the study, startling the ghost of Salazar so that the curse was cut short. He let out a bloodcurdling scream when he saw what was happening to his only brother on the floor.  
  
"Tom? What are you doing here?" the man asked, trying to steer his younger son to the door.   
  
"I heard Victor screaming... What did you do to him?" Tom cried, pushing his father aside to hurry to his brother.  
  
"Step aside, boy, or I'll torture you to death too," the ghost growled.  
  
"Good, do so," Tom retorted, eyes now swollen with tears. He placed a small young hand on his older brother's quivering and bleeding shoulder.  
  
"Tom, get out of here," his father stammered.  
  
"No. I'm the ninth son. Don't do this to Victor. Please. He's had too much trouble on my account already."  
  
"Tom, get out of here right now," his father repeated.  
  
"I'm the ninth son. Just let him go!"  
  
"Don't be ridiculous," the ghost of Salazar mocked him.   
  
"No... look..."   
  
With a look of utter anguish and horror, Tom extended his left arm and rolled up the sleeve of his robe to his elbow, revealing a black skull with a serpent rising from its mouth imprinted on the inside of his forearm. 


	5. St Mungo's

February 12, 1914  
  
"Now, Victor," Albus Dumbledore began patiently as he sat down on the foot of a hospital bed, "There was a prophecy twenty-two years ago. Do you know it?"  
  
The tense-looking boy in St. Mungo's shook his head slowly.  
  
"Twenty-two years ago, a seer named Cordelia said this: 'In 1914 on the eleventh day of the second month, the ninth son of the serpent will brandish the mark of his master and shall become the slave of Slytherin to restore the sword."  
  
Victor touched the still-bleeding cut on the back of his head.  
  
"Your father, grandfather, and Salazar Slytherin, an ancestor of yours, thought the prophecy was about you, not your little brother Tom. Neither knew that the Dark Mark would appear that night."  
  
"When will I get my magical powers back?" Victor asked, still shaken from the incident the night before. He watched the blood on his fingertips drip down to his palm.  
  
"I'm afraid never. One of the first things to happen when the cruciatus curse is performed for a prolonged period of time is that the victim loses all magical powers. I have-"  
  
"So I'm not a wizard anymore? How will I continue school?" Victor stammered, jolting up in bed but then wincing with pain.  
  
"You should lie down. Recovery is a very slow process. Now, Victor, I decided that it is safer for you to live as a muggle from now on. That way, the wrong people cannot find you as easily. You cannot stay here for much longer because of what you saw last night. I made arrangements for you to live with a family in London. They are extremely nice people. I know them because the wife is the sister of a former student of mine; she is a squib. They have agreed to take you in and help you finish your schooling. Their names are Fiona and Chester Orville."  
  
Victor did not say anything; he was too shocked and distraught to hear that he would never be able to perform magic ever again. And who were these people who he was now being forced to live with? He did not know them, he had never met them, and now he was expected to just make a lovely little home with them as if nothing happened? He then began to wonder who Dumbledore was trying to protect him from. He tried to ask, but he felt too week to even open his mouth. The room seemed to tip over to the right then to the left.  
  
"I'm sorry for awaking you, Victor. You should try to get as much sleep as possible. I will talk to you at a later time. For now, good luck."  
  
And with that, Dumbledore swiftly stood up and brushed a few strands of dark brown hair away from Victor's closed eyes.  



End file.
